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Jason Fagone’s The Woman Who Smashed Codes — A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikey Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies is a significant contribution to women’s history and to the history of code-breaking. Elizebeth Friedman (1892-1980) carved out an amazing career for herself. She was raised in a small town in the Midwest. She only went to college because she insisted upon it. Ironically, Swarthmore rejected here. Upon graduation from a relatively obscure college, Friedman insisted upon looking for a job befitting her talents and interests. She had studied poetry and philosophy in college, so non-teaching jobs did not readily present themselves. Undeterred, Friedman kept looking. Code breaking wasn’t exactly on her radar screen, but through luck and perseverance she started working for a rich eccentric with an interest in code breaking as it related to Shakespeare. Ultimately she broke from the eccentric’s private colony and moved on to crack bootlegging codes and then to breaking Nazi codes during the Second World War. Very few people came close to being able to do what she and her similarly talented husband William Friedman were able to do, but their story — particularly her story is little known. Happily J Edgar Hoover and his FBI come out looking vainglorious and feeble, as the the Coast Guard and Elizebeth Friedman shine.

The book is well written and extensively researched and provides a fascinating story about a woman most people have never encountered and whose tracks were pretty well covered by confidentiality agreements and the likes of J Edgar Hoover. Friedman herself contributed to her undervalued obscurity by generally avoiding attention and insisting that her husband was more worthy of notice. Coming on the recent movie about Alan Turing, this is yet another important contribution to understanding how World War II espionage worked, on both sides. This important biography also shines some light on what it was like to live and work in Washington during and the 1930’s and the war period.

Every time I run across a biography of a highly consequential women who worked in obscurity, I wonder how many more are out there. Thank you, Mr. Fagone for bringing Elizebeth Friedman the attention she deserves.

People really need to read this book! William L. Shirer, the famous author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich – A History of Nazi Germany, kept a diary while he was stationed in Berlin from 1934 to 1941. Shirer began as a print journalist but was converted to a radio journalist in Berlin the 1930’s and though 1940. I recently read his diary from that period, Berlin Diary – The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941. Shirer’s writing is clear and absorbing. His diary is a primary source, and it makes for harrowing reading.

Shirer was a foreign correspondent for various American outlets when he found himself in Germany in the 1930’s and through the pivotal year 1940. His own experiences of struggling with censors and putting out his broadcasts in the midst of heavy bombing are justification enough for his book. His visits to the countries Germany has defeated are fascinating and ominous all at the same time. Many of his colleagues were kicked out by the Germans. Shirer tries to stay on the grounds that his witness is important, but he knows the Germans are using him or at least think they are. It is a fascinating game. Shirer’s narrative bounces from visits to battlefields, to encounters with Nazi leaders, to every day life in Berlin, to worries about his own safety and self-respect. He tries to figure out exactly what is happening and get the word out without getting kicked out of Germany.

The transcending importance of this book is that Shirer’s personal experiences occur within the malevolent atmosphere of Nazi Germany and the countries it defeated. I found it impossible to read about the unrelenting cruelty and domination of the Nazi’s and not think about what is happening in the United States today. Whereas here we have attempted censorship of the press and ham-handed efforts to exclude reporters, in Nazi Germany this is what actually happened as a matter of course. Germans had long been denied accurate internal reporting of hardships and loss, so they became inured to it and stopped believing anything they read. Now we find ourselves in an era of “fake news,” where our leaders feel no compunction to tell the truth or keep their promises. Bullying has become an accepted political tactic. Are Americans getting to cynical and complacent to resist? Similarities with Nazi Germany are growing, and we should fear what might come next in our own country.

Shirer’s diary underscores the point that the truth ceased to matter in Nazi Germany and that the Nazi leaders felt emboldened to create an endless, self-agrandizing narrative to dress up and justify their criminal actions. So, too, were they emboldened to villify Jews and other handy scapegoats because they felt they could. This is a terrifying blueprint.

Although Shirer’s book feels particularly prescient at this time and he openly states his opinions, he has not written a polemic. This is the diary of someone trying to be a journalist in the midst of Nazi Germany. Shirer’s own American perspective is very much in place and enhances the value of his diary, which he obviously kept hidden while in Germany.

Lastly I should note that whereas liberals like myself may read this book and draw ominous analogies with current American politics, even if your politics are far to the right of mine, this book has profound historical significance and is an excellent read. I recommend it.

James Srodes’s Spies in Palestine — Love, Betrayal, and the Heroic Life of Sarah Aaronsohn is a concise account of a relatively obscure bit of Israeli history — the spying activities of Sarah Aaronsohn and her family during World War I. Sarah Aaronsohn stands out as a liberated woman from birth. Her confidence and initiative were strikingly uncommon for women of her era and made her an unusually placed and fascinating feminist hero. A very active horsewoman, Sarah roamed widely with little apparent regard for convention. The book recounts her relationships with various men in her life. Although it does not appear that she and T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) had an affair, Lawrence keeps wandering in and out of Sarah and her family’s milieu. In comparison to boisterous energy of Sarah and her family, Lawrence comes across as a bit of an ineffectual wimp, not at all like the strong, gorgeous hero portrayed by Peter O’Toole in the epic movie Lawrence of Arabia.

The Aaronsohns were Romanian Jews who settled in Palestine under the Ottoman Empire in the 1880’s. Sarah was born in Palestine and lived there most of her life, except for a short, unfortunate marriage that took her to Constantinople. Her family was based in Zichron Ya’akov and was relatively well known. Indeed, Sarah’s eldes brother Aaron developed an international reputation as an agricultural expert and used that to leverage international contacts and ultimately to begin spying on behalf of the British. The Aaronsohns’ spying effort were inspired by the Turks’ oppression of Palestine’s Jewish settlers during World War I. As it happens, the intelligence provided by the Aaronsohns through their spy ring was largely unsolicited by the British and sadly lacked discipline. In fact, it was almost comical how difficult Aaron and his family found it to help Britain. The Aaronsohns aggressively acquired information on Turkish positions in Palestine in order for the British to plan an effective invasion, but the British did not particularly trust the information and were not particularly interested. Even when the British decided to accept the Aaronsohns help they showed little concern for their safety and their military efforts were ineffectual.

Sarah become involved after she fled her marriage in Constantinople and returned to Palestine. On her way home she had observed first hand the Turks’ outrageous treatment of Armenians, and her entire family was appalled by the Turks’ treatment of Jews. Her brother Aaron had left Palestine to engage in efforts elsewhere, and so Sarah assumed leadership of the spy ring upon her return to Palestine. Although the information provided the Aaronosohns was good, the group’a execution was amateurish, particularly since the British mixed their lack of interest with a healthy dose of incompetence. They were easily betrayed, and tragedy ensued.

This is the story of successful espionage, but rather the story of an unbelieveably brave woman who voluntarily led a major effort to gather intelligence for Britain. Although it did not end well, Sarah’s heroic efforts deserve to be known and honored.

I liked this book for a lot of reasons. It was well-written and kept a good pace. More importantly, I learned about an early Jewish feminist who played a significant part in the early history of Israel. The historical backdrop of early twentieth century Palestine, Turkey and Britain, combined with the presence of the international Jewish community and a fantastic cast of characters made this a compelling read.

Leon Stein wrote The Triangle Fire in 1962. Stein, who died in 1990 was the editor of Justice, the official publication of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.

The Triangle Fire recounts the horrific story of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire, when 123 young women and 23 men died in a New York sweatshop that had locked doors and utterly inadequate escape routes. This is a very timely book. This kind of tragedy is what happens when employers of defenseless and desperate poor women ignore fire laws (which weren’t all that great anyway) and lock their employees into their workplace, just to maintain complete control and perhaps make a few more dollars. While industrial accidents are scarcely unknown in this country, they happen regularly and often on a much larger scale in third world countries where so many of our clothes, electronics and other consumer goods are made. (William Greider’s excellent introduction to The Triangle Fire does an excellent job of recounting some of these more recent tragedies.)

Stronger unions, better fire laws and arguably better fire enforcement all ensued after the Triangle Fire, but the fire didn’t need to happen and all those workers certainly didn’t need to die. Ironically, Stein writes that because of the way the owners were permitted to overinsure their buildings, they may well have profited from the fire. The sad fact remains that 146 immigrant women, mostly Jewish and Italians, were killed — many of them by jumping out the windows of the sweatshop to avoid being burned to death.

This book is a strong reminder that workers need protection from their bosses, who cannot be relied upon to put safety first. Safety regulations, effective enforcement and constant vigilance are required to prevent industrial tragedies. Unfortunately the strong anti-government, anti-regulatory fervor that has gripped Washington doesn’t bode well for protecting our workers, and this country’s current leadership has given no indication whatsoever that it cares about the safety of American workers, much less the safety of third world workers who make so many of our products. To the contrary, the focus seems to be on freeing the rich of all those nasty curbs on their freedom to get richer on the backs of everyone else.

This is a relatively short and very clear book. I recommend it because it tells an important story about one of this country’s most disastrous industrial tragedies and because it reminds us how vulnerable this country’s workers still are.

I’ve always been a fan of Dwight Eisenhower, primarily because of his deft and resilient military leadership during World War II and his careful Cold War leadership during his presidency. The major flaw in Eisenhower’s career has generally been seen as his lackluster support of civil rights. In A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, David Nichols challenges this traditional view and presents Eisenhower as both a reluctant and determined champion of civil rights. (Please note that Nichols’ book was published in 2007, and I don’t pretend to have followed all the scholarship since.) The Eisenhower who emerges in this book about his civil rights record is the same leader who ordered that the horror of the German concentration camps and their victims be photographed when they were liberated because he knew that some day people would try to deny their existence.

By temperament Eisenhower was not the cheerleader type, and he opted do do much of his civil rights work under the radar when he could. He wasn’t particularly happy with the glare of publicly that characterized civil rights in the 1950’s. Still, even before he became president he was on record as supporting an integrated military and took steps in that direction at a time when the rest of the military leadership was not so inclined. Once he became president, Eisenhower steadily directed the integration of the military. True, he didn’t do it overnight, but he steadily pressed until it was accomplished over a period of about two years.

Another Eisenhower success was to get rid of the Jim Crow practices in Washington, DC. This wasn’t a particularly popular move with a lot of southern politicians, but here again Eisenhower didn’t let up until it was accomplished. It is too bad he isn’t around today to put the kabosh on newly energized racist behavior in our nation’s capital and elsewhere.

Much has been written about Eisenhower’s at best ambivalent feelings about the Supreme Court’s landmark school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. At the end of the day Eisenhower sent in federal troops to enforce that ruling in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was always undeniably unhappy about the prospect of sending troops into American communities and he greatly feared that the southern reaction to integration would be to close schoools. Sadly his fears were justified. Here as in other civil rights areas, Eisenhower preferred to work behind the scenes, but he did the right thing when it came to the show down in Little Rock.

Perhaps one of the least appreciated aspects of Eisenhower’s presidential legacy was his refusal to appoint segregationist federal judges. Earl Warren and many distinguished lower court judges ensured that Brown and its progeny were upheld and enforced. This judicial legacy was crucial, and it proved to be very unfortunate that John F. Kennedy failed to continue Eisenhower’s stringent policy. One of the book’s more interesting themes is the complicated and not particularly friendly Warren/Eisenhower relationship after Warren’t appointment. I was also fascinated to learn that Eisenhower, a non-lawyer, actively reviewed and commented on his Civil Rights briefs filed by his administration and that he was keenly aware of linguistic nuances. He understood the strategic importance of legal briefs and opinions.

The author does not give Eisenhower an unvarnished civil rights report card. Eisenhower reportedly said some things that indicated ambivalence about full integration and, most famously, advised the Black community to be “patient” at some point. For the oppressed, “patience” is unacceptable. These comments and Eisenhower’s failure to be a public cheerleader for civil rights aren’t good. Context is nonetheless relevant. Eisenhower, who managed to get two watered-down Civil Rights Acts passed, battled the intensely political Lyndon Johnson and other, overtly racist, southern senators throughout his presidency. Engaging in open battle over civil rights, while morally and ethically the right thing to do, wasn’t going to be an effective strategy in the 1950’s.

Finally, the context of Eisenhower’s civil rights performance has to be considered in the context of all the issues facing his presidency. This was the era of the Bomb, when school children were being taught to hide under their desks to protect themselves. Eisenhower necessarily spent a great deal of his presidency trying to control the arms race and deal with foreign aggression. That would have been a full plate for many presidents, and presidential history is replete with presidents who good at foreign policy and failures at domestic policy and vice versa. While one can always argue that Eisenhower could have done more, his civil rights achievements need to be understood, and this well-written book cautions that Eisenhower’s relative public reticence on the subject is belied by some very impressive accomplishments.

This book is well worth reading. In addition to the author’s interesting take on Eisenhower’s civil rights record, it provides a fascinating look at the United States in the 1950’s.

Underground in Berlin – A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in Nazi Germany represents a fascinating and important contribution to Holocaust literature. The author Marie Jalowicz Simon was a young Jewish woman who survived World War II by hiding in Berlin, often in plain sight. She survived to complete her education and become a professor in Berlin. Prior to 1997 Simon generally refrained from telling her story and angrily rejected requests for interviews. But finally, in 1997 during the last year of her life, she dictated her story onto 77 tapes (900 pages of transcript). Although she didn’t keep a written diary during her years of hiding, Simon had maintained a remarkable diary in her head. Marie Simon died in 1998, and approximately fifteen years later, after substantial research and editing, her son published this important book.

Every survivor’s story is unique, but Simon’s is really unusual, mostly because of her attitude. Simon was an educated woman in her twenties in Berlin. Her parents had died and she had no one depending on her. This gave her some freedom and mobility, but it also meant she had only herself to rely upon.

To survive in and of itself was noble, and Simon insisted on surviving. Apart from an unsuccessful effort to marry and relocate to Bulgaria, she stayed in Berlin and its environs. She kept her health and had tremendous ingenuity and nerve. Perhaps more importantly, she had just enough contacts to keep finding a series of short term places to stay. Simon was furious at her situation and furious at the German people, so she wasn’t particularly grateful to those who helped her. She never betrayed anyone, but neither did she waste much time mourning those who didn’t make it. Simon comes across as a difficult person who probably wasn’t the easiest houseguest or the nicest person to have around. But then, to hear her tell it, many of the people who took her in frequently weren’t very nice either. They seemed to have jumbled motives and were frequently unpleasant.

Not to digress, but an interesting study on what it takes to be a rescuer might be conducted just from looking at the lives of the people who stepped up to help Marie Simon. They were a very diverse group of odd personalities from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds. Unpleasant they may have been, but undoubtedly they stuck their necks out when they sheltered Simon. In the end, we see her rescuers only through Simon’s eyes, and she doesn’t dwell on how scared many of them must have been.

This book is particularly striking because of Simon’s strong voice. Simon absolutely rejects the fate the Naxi regime is determined to impose. At some level she holds all Germans accountable for the crimes implicated upon Jews and thinks that those helping her are only doing what they were supposed to do. Her rage is impressive and constant, even as she is always on her guard and looking for her next place to hide. The bottom line is that Simon was courageous and bold, and she succeeded in surviving for three years in Berlin during the last years of World War II. It is a great story.

Agata Tuszynska has written a remarkable family memoir, Family History of Fear, A Memoir. Tuszynska is a Polish poet and writer who tries to find out what happened to her family, both before and after the Holocaust. As the daughter of a survivor, she has some family assistance with her search, but in the end there is a lot she cannot know. The author’s efforts to uncover the past are founded on one basic story. Her grandmother nearly survived, but died just when she had reason to feel she might be safe. Despite her own death, the grandmother managed save to her daughter, the author’s mother.

For Polish Jews, it wasn’t enough to to survive the Holocaust. Pogroms survived World War II, and then Poland had its own anti-Semitic purge in the late 60’s. A surprising number of the author’s relatives survived and elected to remain in Poland to work with the new Communist regime. The decision to stay despite having lost so many family members and barely escaping death themselves during the war years is bewildering. Poland may have been their home, but it never felt really safe.

This isn’t a book where the author’s story is neatly sewn up. There are stray ends and elderly relatives who either don’t know much or have chosen to forget. It isn’t all the surprising that Tusznska’s family history is difficult to pin down, because so much was lost during the war, and this was not a cohesive family unit. Episodic poverty and the near-constant threats to their security, combined with a series of deaths, divorces, second marriages and various alliances depict a family under considerable stress. At times I found it difficult to keep all the aunts and cousins straight, but that didn’t detract from the author’s story. To the contrary, this somewhat messy family history where not all relatives are forthcoming about the past and where everyone didn’t always behave all that well rings very true. At some level the people who survived are very ordinary. They seem to go about their lives without a lot of reflection about their extraordinary experiences.

In addition to being a wonderful family saga, Family History of Fear also adds to what we know about the Holocause and how some people managed to survive, as a result of bravery and luck, was well as the kindness of those who chose to help.

Alistair Horne’s Hubris – The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century focuses on the dangers of over-confidence in the military arena. He begins with a brilliant quote from the German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck: “A generation that deals out a thrashing is usually followed by one that receives it.”

While focusing on the fateful decisions made by various admirals and generals, Horne provides a useful history of warfare in the Twentieth Century. This is no history of the Korean War or of the Russo-Japanese War, but I learned a lot about both from this very readable book. Again and again Horne shows how prior victories gave outstanding tacticians unfounded confidence in their ability to keep winning. At some point, they stopped reflecting and accounting for worst case scenarios and just got carried away by feelings of invincibilty.

Horne’s study of why wars unfolded as they did is well told. Plainly there are a myriad of factors, but I’d much rather focus on individuals and their fateful decisions. There were plenty of fundamentally evil players on the battlefields of the Twentieth Century, but Horne also shows how more thoughtful and nuanced individuals also got carried away and just kept pushing until they seized defeat from the jaws of victory, as one of my colleagues used to say.

I recommend this book for its focus on the folly of hubris and also because it provides a lucid tour of warfare in the Twentieth Century.

I Will Have Vengeance – The Winter of CommissarioRicciardi is Maurizio de Giovanni’s first book in the Commissario Ricciardi series. Based on the two books I have read thus far, this is a great series. Commissario Ricciardi is a compelling and mysteriosly driven detective struggling in the dangerous muck of fascist Naples. The few friends he has are intriguing in their own right, and Naples provides a dangerous and romantic backdrop.

Since I Will Have Vengeance is the first novel in the series, De Giovanni takes his time describing Commissario Ricciardi, his environment and what makes him tick. Ricciardi is an unusual, tragic soul with a mystical approach to solving crimes. I found the mystical twist to be an unnecessary distraction, but I still loved this book. Ricciardi is plenty smart; he doesn’t need to “see things” that others do not see. Mysticism aside, Ricciardi is a compelling and clever detective whose remote and forbidding demeanor intimidates his boss and vaguely offends most of his colleagues.

The historical and operatic context of I Will Have Vengeance is its greatest strength. A nasty yet immensely talented opera singer is bumped off, and Ricciardi faces intense political pressure to solve the case immediately. The year is 1931, and Mussolini’s fascism has overtaken Italy, but this particular mystery is driven by opera. As it happens, Ricciardi knows little about opera, so an enthusiastic opera buff is recruited to educate the detective about the opera and its singers. It is a nice twist to have an Italian detective know so little about opera, and we learn as Ricciardi learns.

Even so, the prevailing political mood is sinister and opportunistic. Fairness and justice are early casualties, although this book doesn’t have the cold and deadly atmosphere of terror that dominates a later book I read in this series. Clearly things will be getting much worse in fascist Italy.

I happen to love European noir mysteries. This excellent series stands out because it is set in Naples, which combines its own blend of poverty and corruption with deadly fascist terror. With the benefit of hindsight, I recommend that you read this series in order to take full advantage of De Giovanni’s brilliant depiction of the creeping horror of fascism, while at the same time developing a complex picture of an unusual and oddly pragmatic detective and his friends.

At times all of the mass murder and genocide across the globe can be numbing. You know it is happening and you see the awful photos, but there is just so much of it that it can seem remote and, God forbid, routine. Well, Loung Ung’s 2000 memoir of her childhood under the Khmer Rouge brings it home. First They Killed My Father – A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, tells a harrowing tale of exile, murder and overwhelming hunger as seen through the eyes of a privileged middle class five year old.

This child knows what she had and has absolutely no idea why she has been abruptly pulled from her comfortable life in Phnom Penh and, together with her family, cast into a hostile rural environment. Ung survives, but as the title of her book suggests, not all of her family was so lucky. The mindless beatings and killings all occur in a numbing environment of hunger and fear. No one trusts anyone; the author and her siblings are told they must hide their Chinese ancestry and middle class roots. It is actually pretty amazing that the kids were able to follow these life-saving directions. They showed a lot of discipline and seemed to have entered into survival mode.

Fortunately, Ung managed to get out. After tough times in a Thai refugee camp, she immigrated to the United States with one of her brothers. She went on to an American high school and college and ended up writing at least two books and working with the Campaign for a Landmine Free World.

I Googled Ung to see what she has been up to since writing this book and learned that she has prompted some controversy within the Cambodian community. In particular, some have questioned whether Ung could have called the details of her childhood trauma so specifically, given that she was so young, only five years old, when the nightmare began. Given that she wasn’t in a position to write it all down, it seems entirely plausible that her youth and the passage of time may have affected some of the specifics of her recollections. Of course the passage of time affects the recollections of many of us.

Such controversies do not blunt the impact of this book. Ung’s story hits you right in the face and breaks your heart. This is what genocide felt like to a young child. She may not have focused on the politics behind the Khmer Rouge’s absurd cruelty and meglomania, but she saw the lunacy behind the terror. People turned on each other with unimaginable viciousness, and mass murder and loss were the result. At some level the politics really didn’t matter.